“Unfamiliar... corpses?”

There was no wind in the graveyard, and yet an inexplicable chill kept spreading through it.

A few withered old trees swayed, like drifting ghostly shadows.

Muen crouched down and gently brushed aside the broken strands of hair hanging over the ghoul’s forehead, revealing a face so horribly twisted that, even so, its original features could still barely be made out.

It was a woman. Judging from her features, she had once been fairly pretty. But her eyes were bulging wide with rage, and the muscles of her face had nearly knotted together completely, burying any trace of that beauty. All Muen could see was fury and savagery.

“Would you take another look, sir? This really is a corpse you’ve never seen before?”

“There’s no need to check again. Didn’t I already tell you? I’ve been here for so long that I know every corpse in this place.”

Leaning against a gravestone, the Limping Priest pulled out a cigarette and a box of matches from his coat.

Using a crooked old tree as a shield, he lit the cigarette and took a leisurely deep drag. The smoke drifted into the mist and drizzle, and before long the two were impossible to tell apart.

Squinting, the Limping Priest said, “It’s like suddenly finding a few weeds sprouting in a vegetable patch you’ve spent years tending. No one would ignore that, and no one would mistake it.”

“That’s... a very elegant metaphor.”

Muen turned his attention back to the ghoul. The Limping Priest claimed he had completely severed ties with the Church, but clearly his canon still retained a certain holy property. Against filth like a ghoul, it held an innate suppressive force.

The ghoul whose skull had been smashed inward was no longer capable of rising again. It was dead beyond dead.

No, that was wrong. She had already been dead. For some reason, she had merely “come back to life.”

For no clear reason, Muen suddenly thought of the hundreds of thousands of Kingdom soldiers at Notasia. Their state back then had not been so different from that of a ghoul... only the reason they had ended up that way might have been the only difference.

Wait. Was there really any difference?

Muen’s expression tightened.

If he extended that line of thought farther still, all the way to the source behind these bizarre events... was there truly any distinction at all?

“What about the other corpses?” Muen rose and asked.

“They’re over here. Come with me.”

The Limping Priest stuffed the canon back into his coat, bent down to pick up the dim lantern, and limped deeper into the graveyard.

Actually, Muen had already wondered why the priest was carrying a lantern in broad daylight. The weather made everything gloomy, certainly, but not so dark that a lamp was necessary.

Especially when the lantern’s weak yellow glow was barely enough to light anything at all.

That was, until Muen caught a faint scent in the air.

“Incense?”

“That’s right. It calms the dead.”

Holding the lantern in front of him, the Limping Priest walked on. The tiny flame inside flickered uncertainly, as though it might go out at any moment. And yet, strangely enough, that weak little light really did seem to drive back some of the cold.

“There probably aren’t any wandering spirits or ghosts in this graveyard, but just in case, I put some calming incense in there. Out of all the time I spent in the Church, that’s about the only skill I kept.”

“Does it actually work?”

“Who knows? It’s a Church method. I just use it. Whether it works or not is something the bishops who invented it ought to worry about.”

The Limping Priest rubbed his chest and let out a raspy chuckle. “And if it doesn’t work, I’ve still got a second method. Between the two, at least one of them ought to do the job.” 𝒇𝙧𝙚𝓮𝔀𝓮𝒃𝙣𝓸𝒗𝒆𝒍.𝙘𝒐𝒎

“...Fair enough.”

The two of them crossed the graveyard. The walk was not long, and before long Muen saw another decrepit wooden shack at the edge of the rain and mist.

It looked like a storage shed.

The Limping Priest pushed the door open. As expected, it let out a harsh creak. Muen looked inside and saw that within the cramped, narrow space, more than a dozen coffins had been stacked and laid out at odd angles.

The wood used to make them was all old and worn, but the long nails sealing them shut were new. Clearly even the coffins themselves had been built recently, using whatever materials were on hand, and the workmanship was rough in the extreme.

“All the unfamiliar corpses got locked inside coffins.”

The Limping Priest hung the lantern in the middle of the shed, and the dim yellow light made the place slightly brighter. “Not every corpse turns like that woman just now, but to be safe, I figured it was better to lock them all up.”

“A wise decision.”

Muen nodded. The Limping Priest might have plenty of experience, but in the end he was still only one man guarding a graveyard this large. Sealing away every unstable factor really was the smart thing to do.

“May I open the coffins and take a look?”

“You can, but only if you’re sure you can keep them under control. If there are two or three ghouls in there and they all come charging out at once, that’d be a real pain for me too.”

The Limping Priest pinched out his cigarette and cast a glance at this man whom he still took for some rookie the Xipos gang had sent to brush him off. “Kid, I don’t want any more trouble. And I don’t want to help anyone else deal with theirs either. I’m old. I don’t have the energy to handle one mess after another.”

“Don’t worry. There won’t be any more ghouls.”

Muen offered no further explanation. He merely flicked his finger, casual as could be.

Bang bang bang bang...

A heavy series of muffled thuds echoed through the shed as the lids of all the coffins flew open at the same time, lifted by some powerful invisible force. Yet under that exquisitely precise control, every single coffin remained completely intact.

As for what lay inside them, two of the coffins had originally seemed ready to make a little trouble.

Now they were not.

“You...”

The Limping Priest’s eyelids twitched violently. He leaned in and glanced into the coffins.

The ordinary ones were one thing. But inside two of them, the interiors had been torn up as though slashed again and again by sharp blades, covered in dense claw marks. Clearly the corpses inside had long wanted a chance to breathe the free air again...

And yet now, the two corpses inside lay as peacefully as though in deep sleep. They could not possibly have been better behaved.

“You brat... so you’re not simple after all.”

“I told you. I came here to deal with this. Isn’t it only normal to have a few tricks up my sleeve?”

“Killing a ghoul with one flick of your finger isn’t some ‘little trick.’”

“It’s not nearly as dramatic as you’re making it sound. It’s just [N O V E L I G H T] that a hardworking man always has to train his fingers exceptionally well. Otherwise, when you’re outnumbered, it’s very easy to end up at a disadvantage.”

“...I’ve got no idea what you’re talking about.”

“You don’t need to. Just a private little matter.”

Muen paced around the coffins, beginning to inspect the bodies one by one.

“May I ask you a few questions?”

“Of course. Go ahead.”

“How did these corpses appear in the graveyard?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know?”

“I told you already. These corpses appeared out of nowhere, at times when I never noticed a thing. They just... showed up. And where they show up is completely random. Some are underground, like the woman I showed you just now. Some are in other graves. Some have even appeared in my room.”

The Limping Priest lit another cigarette, took a deep drag, and said in a melancholy tone, “Do you know what it feels like to roll over in bed at night and suddenly find a cold female corpse under your blanket?”

“...I can’t imagine that feels very good.”

The corner of Muen’s mouth twitched. He had never experienced it himself, but he could fully picture the priest’s terror at the time.

That was just too much. In horror stories, the blanket was supposed to be an invincible sanctuary.

“Of course it doesn’t.”

Expressionless, the Limping Priest shrugged. “If I hadn’t spent the last few decades living alongside corpses, I probably would’ve gone to see the goddess right then and there.”

“Seems the goddess still doesn’t want to see a heretic like you.”

Muen made a joke that was not especially funny. Naturally, the priest did not laugh. He just rolled his eyes in disdain.

Muen shook his head and continued examining the bodies.

“These corpses all have very obvious external injuries.”

“That’s right. I checked them all roughly. Just about every one of them died from severe wounds that couldn’t be treated. Sword wounds, arrow wounds. Some look like they fought some powerful enemy in a life-and-death struggle. Others show no signs of resistance at all. Those were clearly slaughtered outright.”

“Battle... slaughter... Their expressions are all terrified. I can feel their fear, and... their anger.”

Muen reached out and gently lowered the wide-open eyelids of one corpse whose death had been especially gruesome.

Fear, anger, fear, anger...

And buried deep beneath those cloudy pupils, a despair so subtle it would be hard to notice without close inspection. In terms of emotional residue, all of these corpses seemed strikingly similar.

Muen thought of Raskin’s corpse not long ago. That mob boss who had died so inexplicably had been the same—staring off in one direction, his face twisted in rage.

And if they shared such similarities, then there had to be a shared cause behind them as well.

What, exactly, had they experienced before death?

And why had they died so suddenly, so bizarrely, so without warning, and without alerting anyone at all?

“It looks like I’ll need to investigate this more deeply.”

After a brief moment of thought, Muen seemed to settle on a plan.

“How do you intend to deal with these corpses?” the priest asked.

“I’m not.”

“That’s good enough, because even for me, dealing with these strange corpses... wait, what did you say?”

The Limping Priest stared at him in shock. “You’re not dealing with them?”

“That’s right. I’m not.”

“Then what did you come here for? Don’t forget, I called you here because—”

“Easy now, easy now. Just because I’m not dealing with them directly doesn’t mean I don’t have a way to deal with them.”

Muen soothed the priest in a soft, gentle voice.

“I’m only changing the method. The end result will be the same... But before that, I’d like to ask a favor of you, Father.”

“A favor? What favor?”

The Limping Priest suddenly had a bad feeling. Suspicion filled his face. “This isn’t going to be troublesome, is it?”

“Not at all. Just a small favor.”

Smiling, Muen went straight to the point. “Please give me a way to contact the city watch.”

“...Huh?”

The priest froze. Then, after he processed the words, his eyes nearly bulged out of his head.

He looked Muen up and down—this man in a black coat, half his face buried in the shadow of his hat brim, a man whose very presence screamed that he was up to no good...

“You want the city watch’s contact information? Why?”

“For no particular reason.”

Lowering his head, Muen spoke with utter sincerity.

“I just want to be a good, concerned citizen.”